Thank you so much for writing this. It is exactly what I’ve been talking about for years. I’m a vegetable farmer and we only buy local meat and eggs from farmers we know. Years ago I made this choice and what it means is, we spend a little more on meat, but we eat less of it. In Canada, we also need the kind of changes you are suggesting.
Thanks Kimberley, this was a difficult subject for me to tackle because I was a meat producer when we had the pig farm. So I was trying to really get to the middle of the debate that demonises meat eating but also the facts. Ultimately the more we can support small scale high welfare farmers the better!
The meat debate in UK and in Sweden is very similar from what I can gather. One difference is that most of the grasslands in Sweden have been converted to forests over the last 150 years, and there is a general understanding (well some hard core vegans oppose that as well) in Sweden that we need more grazing.
That’s a really useful comparison, and you’re right to flag the grassland history as the key difference. When semi natural grasslands have been steadily lost to afforestation and abandonment, more trees is not automatically a biodiversity win, because you can end up losing the open habitat mosaics that a lot of species depend on. In that context, grazing is not just food production, it’s a land management tool that keeps those systems functioning.
It also underlines the point I keep coming back to in the UK debate. We talk about meat as if it’s a single moral category, when the real question is what kind of land we have, what kind of habitat we are trying to maintain, and what kind of livestock system fits that place. Sweden’s “we need more grazing” argument makes sense if the alternative is grassland turning into uniform forest and the loss of open country biodiversity.
Out of curiosity, in Sweden is that understanding actually reflected in policy and incentives, or is it more a cultural consensus that still has to fight the economics. I’d love to know where the leverage has been strongest, payments, advisory support, market premiums, or something else.
You can get support from government, sometimes also from local government or certain agencies to restore grasslands and there is a continual support for maintaining grasslands via the CAP-budget's environmental provisions. So the trend of abandonment is broken. In the plan for nature restauration, more grasslands shall be restored, but as it stands now 100,000 hectares, getting to total area up to 500,000 hectares, just a little above 1 percent of the total land area! Experts tend to say that we should have at least 2 million hectares. But also restauration is tricky. In reality, some 10-15 million hectares of "forests" were grazed historically in Sweden, animals were just fenced out from the villages and allowed to roam in the vicinity. But then "forests" were open mosaic landscapes. But since forestry became important in the late 1800s, cattle, sheep and goats were, gradually, no longer allowed in the forests and forests as they are managed to day in very dense stands have little to eat for grazers.
I get the spirit of your piece, but, ultimately, you are arguing for the forced removal of choice from consumers by the state. It is gov't regulation which makes life impossible for farmers who can no longer produce at lower scale and costs. If someone produces meat (animals bred as food for human beings) at cheaper cost they should be allowed to do it. If their methods are disapproved of by someone they should have the choice to pay more for a different supplier. Breeders do not set out to cause harm to their animals, in fact the best meat comes from the better raised animals. More regulation is the problem, not the solution. It makes production more expensive and pushes small producers out of business.
I hear you, but I think you’ve slightly misread what I’m arguing for. I’m not calling for the state to force remove consumer choice, and I’m not pretending regulation is painless or that it hasn’t been used in ways that crush smaller producers. A lot of the current burden is real, and it often lands hardest on the people with the least admin capacity.
Where I do disagree is on the idea that breeders do not set out to cause harm so it all comes out in the wash. I’ve been a pig farmer, and I’ve worked with farming charities, and I’ve seen the full spectrum. Many small scale farmers care deeply, they produce exceptional meat, and they act as genuine custodians of the land. But in large scale industrial operations, some animals are not treated like animals at all. They’re treated like products on a factory line, and the system is designed to prioritise throughput, not care.
What I am asking for in the piece is consumer honesty and mindfulness about what “cheap” meat represents in practice. Price is not just price, it’s a bundle of choices about welfare, labour, pollution, antibiotic use, and who carries the risk and cost when things go wrong. If we want to be more food secure and look after our countryside, we may have to make some hard choices, including eating less of the lowest welfare, highest impact meat, and supporting systems that keep farmers viable without externalising the damage.
And if I was going to argue for any forced choice, it would not be to remove options from consumers in general. It would be to ban factory farming, so that small scale, local produce from farmers who actually love their animals and look after the land was the only option on the shelf. Short of that, I’m asking for transparency and accountability, so people can make choices with their eyes open rather than being sold a narrative.
Thanks for the reply. To be clear, there is no doubt in my mind that you mean well. But "forced choice" is no choice at all, it's coercion - even if it is for a laudable goal. Banning factory farming (or anything for that matter) requires the state to legislate, create regulations AGAINST the choice to produce large scale and therefore the choice of consumers to buy at lower, affordable prices. You are right about transparency. If a consumer knows what he buys he can choose what he buys. Most people would go for higher quality and welfare (I do), but some cannot afford the higher end. You are unwittingly calling for the end of affordable meat and the ban on someone to be able to invest in better, higher welfare large scale and improve its standards even more when consumers ask for it. (As a breeder you know that stressed animals produce lower quality meat.).
You are correct that factory farming is the culprit. We eat meat rarely but have plenty of local options. As for the general public; when they are starving they will get their heads out of their asses - not before. Those people who want to ensure and enhance their survival have plenty of places to turn to for alternatives. People like me have been crafting alternatives for decades.
I hear the frustration, and I agree with you on the core point that factory farming is the culprit, not the existence of meat itself. It’s encouraging too that you’ve got local options and have built your diet around them, because it shows alternatives can work when the infrastructure is there.
Where I’d gently push back is the idea that people will only change when they’re starving. Some will, but a lot of people are already living with food insecurity, time poverty, and health issues, and the system still keeps them boxed into the cheapest, easiest options. Knowing there are alternatives is not the same as being able to access them, especially when local processing, local retail, and fair pricing have been hollowed out.
I really respect that you’ve been crafting alternatives for decades. That’s exactly the kind of lived, practical knowledge we need more of. If you’re up for sharing, what have you found makes the biggest difference in getting people to actually switch, is it price, convenience, relationships, or simply having a local producer they can trust.
‘The UK cannot supply current levels of meat consumption through high welfare, lower impact systems without either importing more, intensifying more, or eating less.’ I also think we have to acknowledge the sheer volume of waste that the modern system based on factory farming leads to. I don’t feel it’s just that we’re (generalising) eat too much meat - the system permits slaughter on such a massive scale that binning tonnes of meat (and other food) each day isn’t seen as a major problem and waste. If we did go back to smaller scale, localised farming where we all knew our providers and saw more of the animals from birth to butchery, I believe we would take more care and act with more restraint than now.
Thank you for reading! You’re right that factory scale slaughter makes waste feel invisible. When tonnes of meat can be binned, downgraded, or redirected without anyone having to look the animal in the eye, it stops registering as a moral or material failure and becomes just another line in the logistics spreadsheet. That is not a neutral outcome, it’s a design feature of a system built for volume and margin.
And I agree with you about what localisation changes. It doesn’t magically make everything perfect, but it shortens the distance between decision and consequence. When you know the people producing your food, and when the animal’s life is part of the story rather than hidden behind plastic and branding, restraint and care become more likely, not because people are saints, but because reality is harder to ignore.
I farm a modest 90 acres in the Yorkshire Dales National Park in the UK. We have c. 4 feet of rain a year, first frost in September and the last frost in late April. I am the fifth generation of our family to scratch a living out of this farm.
Given the above thumb sketch we are permanent grass.
We harvest that with both sheep and cattle. Surplus grass in spring / early summer is bailed silage for housed livestock in winter.
During WW2 Grandad was ordered to grow some cereal crops. In his case oats for human consumption. Growing was achievable but ripening it was impossible. It simple got fed to livestock.
We do use modest amounts of purchased feed for sheep in the run up to lambing. Also a little extra feed for growing cattle as our silage can be a bit short of energy and protein.
The constitution of those feeds are co-products from human food eg: molassed sugar beet pulp.
I characterise the system as turning stuff we can’t or won’t eat into stuff we can.
Fertilizer is no longer used but we buy some straw for winter bedding.
One pickup, one loadall and me. To be fair my sons help out at lambing time.
So whilst the system is not as pure as the driven snow I reckon the system is pretty sustainable by most metrics.
Food insecurity and actual starvation are on the same continuum. Health issues are also on that same continuum. It has been noted that some Amerikans are actually starved for nutrients and so their physiological triggers drive them to eat more. This induces obesity and all the health issues that go with it.
As for what I see as the necessary triggers to get the mass of people around the globe to shift their eating habits, the most effective one is actual deprivation. Thus my comment that people will not change their habits until they have to. I grew up on a farm and raised purebred Hampshire hogs until we had to leave the farm in 1965. I did a lot of different jobs in my life and was a sustainable market gardener for the last 14 years before we retired, sold the farm, and moved to France in 2018. So I have a background in real peasant mentality, extending all the way back to 1602 in Norway.
My current project is: "Getting as many people up to speed before collapse hits hard." Thus my Substack, which amplifies the methods and paradigm shifts from my last book, Paradigms for Adaptation (2024). The main thesis is that YOU know your situation better than anyone else, so YOU need to build your own solutions by shifting your paradigms. The book and my subsequent Substack posts are stories that percolate into the hard-wiring of the human brain. You just have to read the stories and let your large human brain do the real work.
Thank you so much for writing this. It is exactly what I’ve been talking about for years. I’m a vegetable farmer and we only buy local meat and eggs from farmers we know. Years ago I made this choice and what it means is, we spend a little more on meat, but we eat less of it. In Canada, we also need the kind of changes you are suggesting.
Thanks Kimberley, this was a difficult subject for me to tackle because I was a meat producer when we had the pig farm. So I was trying to really get to the middle of the debate that demonises meat eating but also the facts. Ultimately the more we can support small scale high welfare farmers the better!
We have industrialised cruelty.
Thank you for continuing to try to put a pragmatic perspective to an increasingly emotional and complicated problem.
Thank you John I appreciate the feedback on this piece! It’s not the easiest topic to get right. I upset a lot of vegan activists on LinkedIn! 🤦♀️
The meat debate in UK and in Sweden is very similar from what I can gather. One difference is that most of the grasslands in Sweden have been converted to forests over the last 150 years, and there is a general understanding (well some hard core vegans oppose that as well) in Sweden that we need more grazing.
That’s a really useful comparison, and you’re right to flag the grassland history as the key difference. When semi natural grasslands have been steadily lost to afforestation and abandonment, more trees is not automatically a biodiversity win, because you can end up losing the open habitat mosaics that a lot of species depend on. In that context, grazing is not just food production, it’s a land management tool that keeps those systems functioning.
It also underlines the point I keep coming back to in the UK debate. We talk about meat as if it’s a single moral category, when the real question is what kind of land we have, what kind of habitat we are trying to maintain, and what kind of livestock system fits that place. Sweden’s “we need more grazing” argument makes sense if the alternative is grassland turning into uniform forest and the loss of open country biodiversity.
Out of curiosity, in Sweden is that understanding actually reflected in policy and incentives, or is it more a cultural consensus that still has to fight the economics. I’d love to know where the leverage has been strongest, payments, advisory support, market premiums, or something else.
You can get support from government, sometimes also from local government or certain agencies to restore grasslands and there is a continual support for maintaining grasslands via the CAP-budget's environmental provisions. So the trend of abandonment is broken. In the plan for nature restauration, more grasslands shall be restored, but as it stands now 100,000 hectares, getting to total area up to 500,000 hectares, just a little above 1 percent of the total land area! Experts tend to say that we should have at least 2 million hectares. But also restauration is tricky. In reality, some 10-15 million hectares of "forests" were grazed historically in Sweden, animals were just fenced out from the villages and allowed to roam in the vicinity. But then "forests" were open mosaic landscapes. But since forestry became important in the late 1800s, cattle, sheep and goats were, gradually, no longer allowed in the forests and forests as they are managed to day in very dense stands have little to eat for grazers.
I get the spirit of your piece, but, ultimately, you are arguing for the forced removal of choice from consumers by the state. It is gov't regulation which makes life impossible for farmers who can no longer produce at lower scale and costs. If someone produces meat (animals bred as food for human beings) at cheaper cost they should be allowed to do it. If their methods are disapproved of by someone they should have the choice to pay more for a different supplier. Breeders do not set out to cause harm to their animals, in fact the best meat comes from the better raised animals. More regulation is the problem, not the solution. It makes production more expensive and pushes small producers out of business.
I hear you, but I think you’ve slightly misread what I’m arguing for. I’m not calling for the state to force remove consumer choice, and I’m not pretending regulation is painless or that it hasn’t been used in ways that crush smaller producers. A lot of the current burden is real, and it often lands hardest on the people with the least admin capacity.
Where I do disagree is on the idea that breeders do not set out to cause harm so it all comes out in the wash. I’ve been a pig farmer, and I’ve worked with farming charities, and I’ve seen the full spectrum. Many small scale farmers care deeply, they produce exceptional meat, and they act as genuine custodians of the land. But in large scale industrial operations, some animals are not treated like animals at all. They’re treated like products on a factory line, and the system is designed to prioritise throughput, not care.
What I am asking for in the piece is consumer honesty and mindfulness about what “cheap” meat represents in practice. Price is not just price, it’s a bundle of choices about welfare, labour, pollution, antibiotic use, and who carries the risk and cost when things go wrong. If we want to be more food secure and look after our countryside, we may have to make some hard choices, including eating less of the lowest welfare, highest impact meat, and supporting systems that keep farmers viable without externalising the damage.
And if I was going to argue for any forced choice, it would not be to remove options from consumers in general. It would be to ban factory farming, so that small scale, local produce from farmers who actually love their animals and look after the land was the only option on the shelf. Short of that, I’m asking for transparency and accountability, so people can make choices with their eyes open rather than being sold a narrative.
Thanks for the reply. To be clear, there is no doubt in my mind that you mean well. But "forced choice" is no choice at all, it's coercion - even if it is for a laudable goal. Banning factory farming (or anything for that matter) requires the state to legislate, create regulations AGAINST the choice to produce large scale and therefore the choice of consumers to buy at lower, affordable prices. You are right about transparency. If a consumer knows what he buys he can choose what he buys. Most people would go for higher quality and welfare (I do), but some cannot afford the higher end. You are unwittingly calling for the end of affordable meat and the ban on someone to be able to invest in better, higher welfare large scale and improve its standards even more when consumers ask for it. (As a breeder you know that stressed animals produce lower quality meat.).
You are correct that factory farming is the culprit. We eat meat rarely but have plenty of local options. As for the general public; when they are starving they will get their heads out of their asses - not before. Those people who want to ensure and enhance their survival have plenty of places to turn to for alternatives. People like me have been crafting alternatives for decades.
I hear the frustration, and I agree with you on the core point that factory farming is the culprit, not the existence of meat itself. It’s encouraging too that you’ve got local options and have built your diet around them, because it shows alternatives can work when the infrastructure is there.
Where I’d gently push back is the idea that people will only change when they’re starving. Some will, but a lot of people are already living with food insecurity, time poverty, and health issues, and the system still keeps them boxed into the cheapest, easiest options. Knowing there are alternatives is not the same as being able to access them, especially when local processing, local retail, and fair pricing have been hollowed out.
I really respect that you’ve been crafting alternatives for decades. That’s exactly the kind of lived, practical knowledge we need more of. If you’re up for sharing, what have you found makes the biggest difference in getting people to actually switch, is it price, convenience, relationships, or simply having a local producer they can trust.
Thank you for writing this Helen 🙏🏼
‘The UK cannot supply current levels of meat consumption through high welfare, lower impact systems without either importing more, intensifying more, or eating less.’ I also think we have to acknowledge the sheer volume of waste that the modern system based on factory farming leads to. I don’t feel it’s just that we’re (generalising) eat too much meat - the system permits slaughter on such a massive scale that binning tonnes of meat (and other food) each day isn’t seen as a major problem and waste. If we did go back to smaller scale, localised farming where we all knew our providers and saw more of the animals from birth to butchery, I believe we would take more care and act with more restraint than now.
Thank you for reading! You’re right that factory scale slaughter makes waste feel invisible. When tonnes of meat can be binned, downgraded, or redirected without anyone having to look the animal in the eye, it stops registering as a moral or material failure and becomes just another line in the logistics spreadsheet. That is not a neutral outcome, it’s a design feature of a system built for volume and margin.
And I agree with you about what localisation changes. It doesn’t magically make everything perfect, but it shortens the distance between decision and consequence. When you know the people producing your food, and when the animal’s life is part of the story rather than hidden behind plastic and branding, restraint and care become more likely, not because people are saints, but because reality is harder to ignore.
I farm a modest 90 acres in the Yorkshire Dales National Park in the UK. We have c. 4 feet of rain a year, first frost in September and the last frost in late April. I am the fifth generation of our family to scratch a living out of this farm.
Given the above thumb sketch we are permanent grass.
We harvest that with both sheep and cattle. Surplus grass in spring / early summer is bailed silage for housed livestock in winter.
During WW2 Grandad was ordered to grow some cereal crops. In his case oats for human consumption. Growing was achievable but ripening it was impossible. It simple got fed to livestock.
We do use modest amounts of purchased feed for sheep in the run up to lambing. Also a little extra feed for growing cattle as our silage can be a bit short of energy and protein.
The constitution of those feeds are co-products from human food eg: molassed sugar beet pulp.
I characterise the system as turning stuff we can’t or won’t eat into stuff we can.
Fertilizer is no longer used but we buy some straw for winter bedding.
One pickup, one loadall and me. To be fair my sons help out at lambing time.
So whilst the system is not as pure as the driven snow I reckon the system is pretty sustainable by most metrics.
Food insecurity and actual starvation are on the same continuum. Health issues are also on that same continuum. It has been noted that some Amerikans are actually starved for nutrients and so their physiological triggers drive them to eat more. This induces obesity and all the health issues that go with it.
As for what I see as the necessary triggers to get the mass of people around the globe to shift their eating habits, the most effective one is actual deprivation. Thus my comment that people will not change their habits until they have to. I grew up on a farm and raised purebred Hampshire hogs until we had to leave the farm in 1965. I did a lot of different jobs in my life and was a sustainable market gardener for the last 14 years before we retired, sold the farm, and moved to France in 2018. So I have a background in real peasant mentality, extending all the way back to 1602 in Norway.
My current project is: "Getting as many people up to speed before collapse hits hard." Thus my Substack, which amplifies the methods and paradigm shifts from my last book, Paradigms for Adaptation (2024). The main thesis is that YOU know your situation better than anyone else, so YOU need to build your own solutions by shifting your paradigms. The book and my subsequent Substack posts are stories that percolate into the hard-wiring of the human brain. You just have to read the stories and let your large human brain do the real work.